Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.

Four Reasons for an Information Concierge

There is a role in modern sales and marketing that is just starting to form. I call it the “Information Concierge”, but I suspect a similar role is called many things in many different organizations. This role bridges the gap between potential buyers and the information we have that is of value to them.

In many ways, this is what many of us are doing in social media, discovering conversations that relate to the topics of interest to us, and helping the people in those conversations through sharing data, perspective, anecdotes, and frameworks.

This, in essence, is the role of a concierge – helping to connect those seeking information with the information itself. But, it’s not purely an altruistic pursuit, we do it in order to ensure that our data, our perspectives, our anecdotes, and our frameworks make their way into the conversation. We do this in a non-salesy way, but we do it in a way that works to guide prospects our way slowly over time.

So why not search?

We’re all aware of the power of Google and Bing to find information, and the trends in the market towards deeper searches with more words. It is the main driver of website traffic for many businesses, and many of us have put great effort into being found by the search engines, so it may seem a little counter-intuitive to need an “information concierge” role. After all, it seems like it is an inefficient, human-based way to solve a challenge that the search engines solve so much more efficiently.

The Need for an Information Concierge

I believe though, that there are four reasons that the information concierge role is necessary, and will continue to grow, even as search engines continue to improve:

Clarity: As buyers look for deeper and deeper content, the clarity with which they must craft their search query increases. If you are looking for “measuring email deliverability rates for dedicated sending IPs”, you may or may not find an article that discusses “monitoring email sender reputations and non-delivered email counts by sender address”, even though it may be precisely what you are looking for. The information concierge role, however, can put these two together easily, and guide a person who asks that question in a discussion to the right discussion.

Priority: We all know that the first page of results on Google, and only the first few results there, are what generates nearly all the clicks. If a great article does not find its way to that top list, it will not be discovered by searchers in most cases. The information concierge can prioritize differently, and ensure that the best article, or perspective, for the question at hand is the one that is presented.

Ease: Let’s be honest, it can be difficult to find the information you need sometimes, and just asking a question in an active forum can result in a very quick set of detailed and valuable responses. As we move away from attempting to sell to buyers and towards facilitating their buying processes, the easier we can make it on them, the better.

Perspective: Perhaps the most important reason is the occasional need to change a buyer’s perspective. If they are not aware of your solution category, are thinking about the problem in an outdated way, or are attaching too much weight to the wrong decision criteria, only an information concierge can detect this, and provide them with a carefully crafted and well presented case for changing that perspective.

Search is an incredibly powerful and highly relevant way in which buyers obtain their information, but it remains only one part of the picture. As we move forward, I would suspect we’ll see a much clearer formalization of the “Information Concierge” role.

Does anyone in your organization currently perform this role? What department are they part of?

Simple Metrics and the Business Case for Marketing Automation

There has been a lot of great discussion lately about the business case for marketing automation. For obvious reasons, I'm excited to see the discussion, but it often takes an interesting turn. The way in which people often attempt to measure it is in either efficiency gains, or revenue gains - when compared with a manual process for marketing in the same way.

This is the comparison I see a challenge with, and viewed in that light, it will be hard to see the level of value that is being seen today by the best marketers.

If you look at what marketing automation does in terms of business transformation, it is insufficient to characterize it in terms of simply just an efficiency gain, or a revenue gain. It changes the way that we, as B2B marketing organizations, are able to interact with prospects, and opens up new avenues of prospect understanding and prospect communication that simply would not have been viable without marketing automation.

A comparison is the transition from film to digital cameras. If you look at what is possible with film cameras, in terms of photo sharing, digital editing, virtually unlimited photo storage, and the social media use of photos, it is clear that digital cameras present an entirely new way of interacting with images. If contemplated from a framework of film photography, you might look at something like sharing a photo to Facebook and think of digital cameras as offering an efficiency gain; it’s possible with film, you just snap the photo, develop it, scan it, save it to a file, and then upload it. Much less “efficient” but still possible.

However, this misses the point. These things are not simply spectrums of efficiency or revenue, as there is a certain point at which the task would simply not be done.

If you look at the business process that B2B marketers using marketing automation are working to enable, it has a similar challenge. A simple way of looking at it is that we are seeking to:

a) Understand prospective buyers through reading their digital body language

b) Communicate with them accordingly, either through lead nurturing when they are early in their buying process, or through sales engagement if they are later in their buying process

The challenge with making a direct comparison between marketing as enabled and automated with today’s marketing automation software platforms, and marketing without using automation is that the level of buyer understanding and engagement being sought is simply not attainable without automation in any practical way.

To put the marketing situation in context, using marketing automation, we are attempting to deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time. This means that we might use digital body language to understand the buyer’s role in the buying process (technical evaluator vs economic buyer), we might seek to understand where they are in their buying cycle (awareness/education vs vendor discovery vs solution validation), and we might attempt to time a message a week after they last engaged with us in order to remain top of mind.

Building this with outbound, batch and blast marketing solutions leads to a fundamental problem. Even with this simple version of buyer understanding and message personalization, the level of personalization required quickly moves you from a single communication per month, of perhaps 9000 recipients, to 36 individual communications, each only going to 250 people. On top of this, the lack of built-in awareness of buyers’ digital body language would mean that you had 36 individual segments to select, based on an off-line analysis of the prospect’s behavior.

This leaves us in a similar comparison to the digital vs film photography example. Much as sharing photos on Facebook is theoretically possible using film photography, but in practical terms virtually impossible, marketing in a way that understands and responds to buyers’ digital body language is, in any practical terms, impossible without marketing automation software. You must compare one overall approach with another, and understand it in aggregate.

So, when compared in aggregate, it is tempting to come back to the argument that it only makes sense in terms of a revenue gain or a cost decrease. This is not altogether false, but must be understood in context of your overall market. As it is not possible to truly understand and respond to the unique buying process of each of your buyers without a marketing automation solution, the comparison must now be understood in the context of the competitive landscape. If your competition is understanding and engaging the prospective buyers in your industry based on their individual buying processes, while you are not, they will have access to revenue that you simply will not have access to.

Framing the argument in terms of marketing automation allowing an increase in the efficiency, or the output of an existing revenue generating process is ignoring the fact that marketing automation allows a fundamental, and much needed, change to the revenue generation process itself.

No such thing as a Neutral Outcome

There is no way to determine with 100% accuracy where an individual buyer is in their buying process. This leads to a difficult marketing conundrum when looking at targeting marketing efforts based on a best possible approximation of where that buyer is likely to be in his or her buying process; in a broad enough population, there will always be some response to a marketing campaign, regardless of what buyer stage it was targeted at.

For example, if an end of quarter campaign is targeted at those almost ready to purchase in order to spur the maximum amount of business for that quarter, it will have its maximum effect in buyers that are found to be nearly ready to purchase, and are in the solution validation phase. However, determining the stage a buyer is in is both inexact, and prone to change rapidly with time. Therefore, there will still be some response in buyers found to be in the earlier vendor discovery phase, and there may even be a small response among buyers who are at the earliest phases of education and awareness.

An argument is often made that this means that the best option is to have as broad a pattern of communication as you can. Even at the top of the funnel, you will be able to drive some revenue, albeit small, but with the cost of an email campaign being almost zero, the return is still there. As long as unsubscribe rates are not high, the downside is minimal, so the campaign is worthwhile.

However, this argument assumes that anyone who does not respond to the offer is essentially a “neutral” outcome. They did not respond in a positive manner and move towards a purchase, they did not respond in a negative manner and unsubscribe, so their outcome must be neutral. This thinking is wrong, and leads to dangerous decision-making.

The outcome of the email campaign may indeed be neutral from the viewpoint of the marketer – no action was detected – but from the viewpoint of the prospect it was far from it. A non-response likely indicates that the prospect found nothing interesting about your message. This is a dangerous step towards that individual emotionally unsubscribing - reflexively ignoring your messages without looking to see if they are of interest.

Chances are, you only have a few opportunities to deliver an irrelevant message to a prospect before they begin to emotionally unsubscribe. Whereas they may not immediately, or ever, click on your unsubscribe link, you have essentially lost your ability to connect with that prospect. In today’s B2B marketing environment, no one can afford to lose the interest of their prospective buyers. The best way to maintain their interest is to ensure your communications are highly relevant to who they are, and more importantly to where they are in their own buying process.

One of the key goals of any marketing automation implementation is to do just that – to understand each individual’s behaviors and interests, and allow that person to be nurtured only with content of relevance to them. This approach tightens your segmentation focus to not just the demographics and firmographics of who the individual and their organization are, but also the psychographics of where they are in their buying process.

Only by eliminating the idea of a non-response being a “neutral” outcome can we understand the true cost of an irrelevant marketing communication.

*This post originally appeared as a guest post on Savvy B2B

Marketing Automation and B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010

It’s coming around to that time of year again when we all offer up predictions for what the coming year will offer. As with any of these, it’s a guess, and entirely my own opinion. Here are some of the trends and changes I think we’ll see in the coming year. If, at the end of the year, it turns out I guessed right on a few of these, I will be happy.

Overall Prediction Trend:

Buyers continue to gain control of their own buying processes, and marketers respond by building "revenue engines" to understand, facilitate, measure, and predict these buying processes.


1) Data is Free, Relationships are Not: As contact data becomes more and more available, approaching free in many cases, the value of the relationship will increase. As part of a continuing trend, the ability of your audience to block, prevent, and ignore communications that they don’t desire will increase, with reduces the value of the data (who they are), and increases the value of the relationship (their perception of you). Marketers who think this way, and truly work to provide valuable information to their audience, will do well.


2) Relationships, Education, and Nurturing: The trend in data becoming free (prediction 1) will work in parallel with a trend in information, of relevance to buyers, being expected to be free. Buying relationships will be more and more built on a foundation of buyer education, and the B2B organizations who can educate and nurture prospective buyers over time, without annoying them will win. This means an investment not just in the rich educational content, but also in systems to automatically understand buyer interest and deliver (or have discovered) educational content appropriate to the buyer’s next step.


3) A Degree in Marketing Engineering?: As marketing shifts towards a discipline whereby prospective buyers are understood based on their behavior, and the right content, according to where they are in their buying cycles, is delivered, marketing skills become more operational, process, and data oriented. Marketing hiring will swing towards backgrounds that have these data, operations, and process skills more so than copy and creative skills. Marketing education likely won’t change in this regard during 2010, but the initial discussions will start.

4) Mobile Thinking vs Mobile Devices: Every year in living memory has been talked about as the year that mobile will become big. I think that this coming year will finally see that claim begin to disappear. Sort of. Now that various devices such as the iPhone, are truly able to support a rich, interactive, graphical environment, interacting with your audience in places where they are mobile becomes very possible, but the device, and mobile-specific technology, almost becomes irrelevant. Thinking about what will motivate an audience to act, when they are at a show, see a poster, or are at a venue, how they can connect (text message, or short URL), and what the interaction should be will become part of many B2B marketers’ thinking. Specific mobile technologies, however, will not move beyond niche applications.

5) Brand Promise/Reality Gap Reduction: The trend that social media kicked into high gear in 2009 will continue into 2010; any organization that has a significant gap between their brand promise, and their brand reality will have that gap mercilessly exposed through social media and community-created content. 2010 will see aggressive adoption of basic listening techniques by marketers in order to understand where they are falling short. The gaps here will lead to a much broader discussion of what “brand” means to a B2B organization, that goes beyond logos, taglines, and colors.


6) Marketing Owns The Brand: 2010 may see some very early reshuffling of the decks in terms of what Marketing owns. Social media (prediction 5) will broaden the discussion of “brand” from logos and taglines to the full offering including service and product. A few very early examples will arise of organizations in B2B who have changed their definition of the Marketing team to truly provide them with greatly enhanced ownership or influence into the product/solution areas of the business as well as the services areas around it, as those are both critical to overall company brand and reputation. We likely won’t see mainstream shifts in this ownership until 2011 or beyond.


7) Follow me, Friend me, or List me: in 2010 we’ll see a dramatic shift in the definitions of influence in social media as we move from raw counts (like Followers or Friends) which are almost entirely ignorable, and to a model that comes one step closer to true influence. Each social media site will implement things differently, but an “inner circle” model of people who one actually pays attention to, versus just being a connection, will rapidly grow in relevance. Social media sites that do this well will balance the need for public awareness of how influential a person is (how many inner circles, they are part of) without making it so public that it is widely manipulated or gamed (like Twitter follower counts, for example).


8) Information Discovery Measurements: As marketers begin to cede control of the messages they push out, and begin to act more like publishers without assuming control of the distribution, they will begin to look for measurements of information discovery as their key driver. How, where, and from whom, did an individual discover information relevant to key stages in her buying process. Rather than measure individual outbound campaigns, measuring the likelihood of individual messages to be discovered, ideally through sharing and forwarding, will become more key to marketers.


9) Social Activity, Lead Scoring, and Lead Nurturing: As buyers begin to get more and more of the messages, information, and education through their peers, and through social media, these channels will quickly grow in their relevance to lead scoring and lead nurturing approaches. Awareness of how an individual discovered a message, where, and from whom (prediction 8) will feature very prominently in the lead scoring and lead nurturing routines of leading marketers.


10) Digital Body Language vs. the Discovery Call: As buyers gather most, if not all, of their early information (prediction 2) on the vendors they are considering speaking with online, the role of the salesperson’s “discovery call” shrinks and changes. In 2010, in sales organizations, we will see a rapid recognition of the new reality that buyers are less willing to take an initial call from a vendor salesperson with an assumption of only exchanging basic information. If sales people want to engage with buyers they will need to read buyers’ digital body language, and ensure that they are able to add more value than Google on the initial sales call. If sales teams do not have access to this information they will begin to push their marketing teams to provide it.

11) Measuring the Revenue Engine: As the above trends evolve in 2010, marketers will begin to develop their ability to predict revenue trends well in advance of sales, by measuring and analyzing the overall revenue funnel. Marketing leaders who can do this will become among the most strategic executives at the board room table.

What do you think? Are these predictions likely to happen? I look forward to your thoughts on these.

Relationships Salespeople's Biggest Competitor

Truly great sales skills are both rare, and genuinely valuable in the overall revenue creation process. The art of understanding the people, politics, and pains within an organization, and positioning your offering in such a way to navigate through to a closed deal is difficult and needed. In almost any situation, as you try to navigate the buying process, your competitors will be working to disrupt your progress and further their own.

This is definitely a threat, but many sales people seem to overlook an even bigger competitor to their efforts. Google.

Quite simply, the reason that you, as a B2B salesperson, are invited to meet with prospects is because you carry the promise of unique and valuable information. Whether it is insights into their business, unique perspectives of industry trends, anecdotes of what others in the industry are doing, or access to negotiation options on pricing, service, or terms. Only by providing that valuable insight do you earn the right to their time and consideration.

However, more and more, executives and mid-level decision-makers are becoming less willing to grant that time to salespeople. The reason is not economics, as this trend was here in good times and in bad. The reason is not even solutions that are competitive to yours, as this trend is affecting everyone. The reason is access to information. If a prospect can get information on your capabilities, understand the market’s opinion of your fit in circumstances close to theirs, and form an understanding of the effort and costs involved in making and investment, then the information you provide is not a unique value.

This makes Google your largest competitor for prospects’ attention. If you can’t add more value than Google (or Bing) in your sales call, then you should not go.

The major search engines do a great job of providing access to generally available information, opinions, and perspectives. To provide value, as a sales person, the level of information you provide needs to improve beyond this. To add value above and beyond the search engines, top salespeople need to provide unique perspectives on the prospect’s own situation, inside access to pricing, service, or terms, and intelligent commentary on which industry trends may be relevant to the prospect.

The early stages of buyer education are best done, in today’s environment, by the marketing team, using marketing automation and lead nurturing. This change in the roles of marketing and sales may be uncomfortable, but it is needed in today’s changing buying environment. The insights that might have been gained in the initial discovery conversation is best understood by observing the buyers’ digital body language.

Sales, as an art, will continue to be a key element of delivering revenue to a business. However, as access to information continues to increase for prospects, good B2B salespeople must continue to increase their ability to provide unique information and perspectives.

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/09/25

It’s been more than a week since I wrote my last weekly wrap-up, and that is more a reflection on me than on the writing this week. There are again a lot of great posts out there this week, and I enjoyed reading many more than I was able to highlight here. I hope you enjoy some of this week’s highlights as much as I did


Laura Ramos (B2B Marketing Posts) published her long awaited, and very well thought out Lead Management Market Overview. If you are thinking about an investment in marketing automation or lead management, this guide is well worth reading. Laura’s insights and depth really show through well.
http://b2bmarketingpost.com/2009/09/22/lead-management-market-overview-published/


Dianna Huff (B2B MarCom Writer blog) writes about the challenges, but ultimate success, of a B2b video testimonial campaign with details on how to get approvals, how to plan, and how to structure questions in a non-salesy way to allow customers to speak freely.
http://marcom-writer-blog.com/2009/09/22/b2b-video-waters-customer-testimonial-campaign-a-hit/


Sirius Decisions reports on a trend that Inside sales is on the rise in 2010 – due to cultural acceptance, better technology, and budgetary constraints.
http://www.siriusdecisions.com/live/home/document.php?dA=C1522.78


David Raab (Customer Experience Matrix) reviews the recent Adobe/Omniture acquisition acquisition and what it means for marketers, Adobe, and Omniture. David takes the position that this will squeeze the marketing automation space, but most of the comments disagree with that view.
http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2009/09/adobe-buys-omniture-good-for-marketers.html


Brian Carroll (B2B Lead Generation blog), as part of his series on lead generation, talks about developing and intensifying your ideal customer profile – mostly based around pains you can solve for them, and their motivations, rather than demographics or firmographics.
http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2009/09/develop-your-ideal-customer-profile.html


Adam Needles (Propelling Brands) does a deep dive into the nature of the changing B2B buyer and the evidence for that change. As with all of Adam’s posts, this reflects his history as an analyst, and truly dives into the data and factual evidence.
http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/nailing-down-evidence-that-the-nature-of-the-b2b-buyer-has-changed/


Tom Pick (WebMarketCentral) writes a posts on Product Launches, and why a Rolling Thunder approach may be a better idea than the typical Lightning Bolt approach we often use.
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/better-way-to-launch-new-products.html


Andy Hasselwander (B2B Marketing Confidential) looks at the buying process, and our ability to facilitate it, from the perspective of a “barrier removal strategy” – with an interesting comparison of the B2C and B2B Apple strategy.
http://b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/2009/09/barrier-removal-marketing-strategy.html


Carlos Hidalgo (Annuitas Group), writing on the DemandGen Report, gives an overview of the processes to audit in looking at a marketing automation investment. He makes a very strong case to look at the process first, and not assume that technology can fix a broken process.
http://demandgenreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/process-audit-needed-to-identify-breaks.html


Ardath Albee (Marketing Interactions) makes the case that lead nurturing is very different than stringing together existing marketing campaigns – it needs to lead buyers on a well thought out journey, rather than just communicating frequent messages.
http://marketinginteractions.typepad.com/marketing_interactions/2009/09/lead-nurturing-is-not-about-campaigns.html

Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations

Marketing in a smaller business can be challenging. You wear many hats, from strategist, to copy-writer, to campaign manager. It can often be hard to find the quick wins that will give you more free time in your day while making you a hero with your management team and your sales team.

In this quick (4 minute) video, Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) talks about some of the things you can focus on that are fast, will free up your time, and will get you the most bang for your buck.

Heather knows what she's talking about, as she heads up our SMB customer success team. Her team works with the largest and fastest growing community of SMB customers in the marketing automation space.




(If this video doesn't load, click here to watch Heather's Marketing Automation for SMB Organizations video)

Heather looks at a number of areas that are key to marketing automation success for SMB organizations:

- Auto-responders on web forms
- Simple lead nurturing
- Real-time alerts for your sales team
- Tradeshow follow-up
- Webinar marketing

And with each one, she provides actionable information on how time-strapped and resource-constrained marketers in smaller organizations can quickly implement marketing techniques that free them from ongoing work, while delivering ongoing value.

Best Practices for Webinars and Online Events

Online events, such as webinars, are one of the top techniques used by B2B marketers focused on demand generation. The reasons are clear:

• they are effective at generating interest and attendance
• they are not expensive, compared to in-person events or tradeshows
• a recorded webinar can be re-used as a content asset for many months
• thought leadership can be established through events that feature in-house or industry experts
• prospects appreciate the ability to attend from their desk and drop off if the content is not of interest

However, there is a difference between doing online events, and doing them well. In this video, Rhonda Wunderlin discusses the best practices for promoting the event, minimizing the registrant/attendee drop-off rate, and maximizing the effectiveness through great follow-up.




(if this does not load, please click here for the best practices for webinars and online events video)

Online events and webinars are great for lead nurturing, as they are generally non-salesy, and thus more appropriate in the early stages of a buying process. Registration and attendance also for key indicators of interest and are often used as components of lead scoring programs.

Sales Enablement: A Key Goal of B2B Marketers

As B2B marketers, many of us have mainly focused on lead flow to sales as our key driver. Lead flow is definitely an important and vital part of good B2B marketing and sales alignment, but it is not the only area that should be focused on. Marketing can also bring insights, process, and relationship-building tools to the sales teams they serve, and by doing so, give their sales teams a better ability to understand, manage, and close deals with their prospects.


In a new eBook - "Beyond Lead Flow - Enabling Sales Through Marketing Automation" - 5 main areas that marketing can enable sales are discussed.


The 5 main areas where marketing can enable sales are:

1. Understanding Individual Prospects - their areas of interest, level of engagement, and hot buttons



2. Understanding Accounts - who the key players, who are your internal champions, and who still needs to be engaged in order to move a deal forward



3. Understanding Territories - which accounts are actively engaged in buying processes with your company within each salesperson's territory



4. Building Relationships - providing your sales team with a strong relationship with prospects through personalized marketing to their prospects



5. Maintaining Top-of-Mind Presence - assisting sales with any sales calling campaigns by actively maintaining top-of-mind presence of your brand with prospects

The Sales Enablement eBook is free, with no registration required. However, if you enjoy the content, my only ask is that you share it with others:

Share this eBook on Twitter.

What is B2B Marketing?

What exactly defines Business to Business (B2B) Marketing?

It’s an interesting question, as marketing is a discipline that is common across both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) organizations. However, beneath the surface, there are significant differences in how B2B and B2C marketing is done in today’s environment. It’s worth exploring what B2B marketing entails.

Let’s look at a few of the areas that differentiate a B2B buying process:

Information Exchange

In B2B marketing, you are often dealing with a buying organization that requires a significant amount of information during their buying process. Unlike in many consumer marketing situations where the need for clothes, food, or cleaning products may be well understood, in B2B marketing, that may not be the case at all. Early stage education on industry transition, technology changes, or regulatory changes can be needed in order to best understand why your solution’s category even exists in the first place.

This need to exchange information continues throughout the buying process. Buyers, when convinced that a potential solution exists to their business challenge, will then need to know which solutions to evaluate, what criteria to evaluate them on, and what evidence exists that one solution is better than the others. B2B marketers need to understand where in this education process their largest marketing challenge exists in order to better educate the buyer.

Social media becomes a critical part of this information exchange in a B2B environment as social media forms a great medium through which to educate, converse with, and build relationships with prospective buyers who may be interested at a point in the future. Over time, a great social media strategy in a B2B organization will improve market perceptions of your organization in ways that other brand investments never could.


Multiple Buyers

In B2B marketing, the most common situation is one in which multiple buyers are involved. Each buyer may take a different role in the buying process, whether it’s a technical evaluator, decision maker, or economic buyer. Each of these buyers needs to be educated at each stage of the buying cycle to ensure that they facilitate moving things forward. This leads to a need in B2B marketing for a significant amount of content. Each buyer in the buying committee, at each stage of their buying process, has specific educational needs. Mapping marketing content to the buying cycle is key in ensuring you have the right assets available for each of the buyers involved.

Whereas in B2C marketing, there may be a husband and wife both involved in a buying decision, the unique roles that are played by B2B buyers allow very clear differentiation of buyer roles. By carefully monitoring buyers’ digital body language, B2B marketers can identify buyer roles based solely on their actions. This allows messaging to be catered precisely to the unique needs and interests of each buyer role.


Sales Involvement

The complexity of most B2B transactions means that there is usually involvement of a sales team prior to a deal being finalized. This may be an inside sales team, a field sales team, or a channel partner’s sales team, but the direct involvement leads to another unique aspect of B2B marketing. One of marketing’s main roles in a B2B organization is to provide sales with a steady flow of qualified leads. Given the length of the buying process, this is a challenging undertaking. First, the marketing organization needs to understand the digital body language of buyers in order to see indications of who is ready to buy, both on their main web properties, and also as seen being referred in through the social media “periphery”.

With this insight, B2B marketers can then establish a lead scoring system that identifies and ranks prospective buyers. Those that are ready for sales involvement can be passed on to sales, those who are not yet ready can continue to be nurtured until they do show the signs of being ready. This active management of the top of the marketing funnel leads to unique challenges for B2B marketers, as there is a need for rich thought leadership content of interest to prospects at the top of the marketing funnel in order to effectively nurture leads until they are ready to consider a purchase.

Marketing needs to work on not only a steady flow of qualified leads to sales, but also needs to provide the insights needed to sell better through sales enablement techniques. Sales enablement involves providing insights into which prospects are actively interested, who within an account is a key influencer, and which accounts within a territory should be focused on.

Length of Buying Cycle and Challenges for Marketing Analysis

The length of the B2B buying cycle also causes significant challenges for marketing analysis. Given that buying cycles can last months or quarters, if not years, the analysis that can be performed on marketing’s effectiveness is very different. B2B marketers must take a top-down approach to marketing analysis that looks at an overall lead funnel, where each prospect is within it, and what changes in the lead funnel have been made within the last period of time.

When looking at individual campaigns, each campaign can be analyzed, or even A/B tested against results, but often should only be analyzed against tactical results such as the creation of marketing qualified leads or inquiries of a certain level of qualification. Analyzing individual campaigns contribution to revenue can only be done in B2B marketing with the acknowledgement that many campaigns will have contributed to one revenue event, and that the resulting revenue must be attributed across the contributing campaigns.

Concluding Thoughts on B2B Marketing

As today’s buyers continue to evolve, and gain more of their education online, through social media, or through any other form of online information exchange, the role of the marketer continues to evolve. Whereas the classic role of marketing (as described by Peter Drucker), to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself, has not changed, the techniques for doing that in a B2B scenario are different from those used in a B2C scenario.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

I sat down with various folks on the Eloqua Customer Success team to hear their experiences on what it took to build out a highly successful lead scoring system. Jocelyn Brown (@jocebrown), Chad Horenfeldt (@chadhorenfeldt), and Adrian Chang (@adrianchang) are the folks who help clients with implementing lead scoring at organizations of various sizes and within a variety of industries, so they have the experience to know what it takes to achieve success. Here is their take:




Some key takeaways:
- get buy-in from sales management in order to best align goals
- use a matrix of A-D for fit and 1-4 for engagement
- define what will happen with each lead, based on that matrix, from lead nurturing to sales hand-off
- define an SLA with sales on how long is allowed for follow-up
- don't be shy about lead clawback if too much time passes
- sales cherry-picking leads is a sign of mis-alignment between marketing and sales
- lead scoring is one of the most valuable things a B2B marketing organization can do

I hope you enjoy the video, I always learn a lot chatting with people like Jocelyn, Adrian, and Chad, as they deal with organizations who are wrestling with these challenges on a daily basis.

The Map is not the Terrain: Marketing Analysis and the Non-Linear Funnel

The conceptual model of a funnel is a great one for understanding buyer stages. At the top of the funnel is the broadest universe of suspects who may at some point have an interest in your product or services, but currently do not show significant interest. There are usually the largest number of these potential buyers, hence it being the widest part of the funnel. Further down the funnel, closer to being an actual buyer, interest levels increase while, in most cases, the number of individuals decreases.

Marketing’s overall role is to facilitate the buying process, through which people progress from mildly interested to active buyers. Lead nurturing is the process that we use, and we think in terms of how that nurturing builds awareness, interest, and then purchase consideration. As such, the funnel forms a great representation of the situation, and acts as a very good map. However, as with any map, it is only a representation of the situation, and is not exact.

The biggest difference in the B2B marketing realm is in the linearity of the buying process. The map that a funnel represents is often taken to be linear. Buyers progress through a buying process as neatly as one can draw a funnel, moving through increasing levels of interest, and then ultimately purchasing. However, this is not a reflection of reality. Realistically, most buyers move up and down the funnel in a very non-linear manner.

For many months or years, a potential buyer might move in and out of being interested, occasionally showing a brief spurt of interest, and then falling back into being inactive for long periods. At certain points, a deep amount of research and a significant amount of activity may show that a buyer has moved much further along in their buying process, but then can be followed by a quiet period as internal business changes temporarily pause the project that had led to the heightened interest. This can lead to a perception of a leaky funnel as leads that may seem almost ready for sales shift back to an earlier phase in their buying process.

Overall, the funnel model works; generally buyers progress through increasing levels of interest towards purchase. However, at an individual buyer level, the movement is much less linear. This leads to the challenges with defining a “perfect path” as talked about earlier, each individual passes through a unique path towards purchase, making it impossible to define a single path that can push a buying decision.

Similarly, this non-linearity means that the most workable way of looking at marketing analysis looks at the marketing funnel from the top down. By analyzing a funnel from a top-down perspective, you can see high level trends in terms of how healthy your marketing funnel is, and whether buyers are moving in the right direction within it, but you are not constrained by the behaviors of individual buyers, which may be much less linear.

Much like a map providing an accurate description of terrain when viewed from a high level, but missing the details at a more micro level, a funnel is a great model of the marketing analysis terrain from a high level, but is not an exact view of individual buyers’ behavior. This is a concept worth keeping in mind in designing nurturing programs - one can't assume that buyers progress linearly down a funnel, so one can't sequence marketing content in that order. Instead, buyers at each stage should be nurtured in a way that is specific to that stage, but watched for signs that they are progressing to more advanced stages.

The Buying Process; Auditing your Content Assets

Shifting your thinking from a selling process to a buying process means understanding how buyers buy and what stages each type of buyer goes through. When you have mapped out your buyer roles and the stages in their buying process, the next step is to determine what content is needed or available at each step in order to facilitate their buying process.

A very useful exercise to undertake is an audit of your existing marketing content in order to understand what content you currently have available and what new content may be required. This audit leads to a content matrix that forms a very useful basis for defining both your nurture marketing approaches and your content development strategy.

Creating the matrix is relatively straightforward. On one axis, list the key buyer roles you encounter; perhaps these are the standard technical buyers, user buyers, and economic buyers that are common definitions across many industries, or perhaps you have a more specific set of buyers you engage with.

On the second axis, list the stages of the buying process for your customers. Generally, this goes through three stages:

- Education and Awareness, where buyers learn about what is possible or required in a given industry
- Vendor Discovery, where buyers determine what vendors are available to solve a particular business pain
- Solution Validation, where buyers short list and ultimately select a particular vendor to assist them with a specific challenge

However, the phases of a buying process for your business will be quite specific.

With this matrix complete, you can now remove any cells that are not relevant, perhaps if user buyers are only brought in late in your buying process. Each cell in your content matrix now represents a combination of a buyer and the phase in the buying process that they are going through at a certain point in time. Each of your marketing assets should map to one of these cells (or perhaps a small number of cells in the case of certain broadly applicable assets).

By filling in the content matrix with your available marketing assets, and perhaps color-coding with red, yellow, and green based on quality, you get an overall view of where in the buyers’ buying process your content assets exist, and where they are strong. Some obvious gaps may become immediately apparent.

This content matrix can then be compared against the marketing challenge you face. As you plan your lead nurturing strategies, understanding where in the marketing funnel you need to focus on and where in the buying process your content exists is key.

Marketing Automation - What does it mean?

Consistently, the term “marketing automation” is applied to our industry. I find it a term that is less than ideal when it comes to describing what the industry does, but nonetheless, the term has stuck. I often get the question of “can marketing really be automated” and I think that there’s an opportunity to clarify what aspects of marketing truly can be automated, and what aspects cannot. Also, given that the industry’s growth is surging, there’s an opportunity to look at the dynamics that are driving this desire to automate marketing.

If asked for a definition, I would say:

Marketing Automation is the art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound marketing messages.

Let's look at why.

The Changing Buyer

First, let’s look at our buyers. Over the last decade, their ability to self-educate and manage their own buying processes has increased astronomically. Whether it is through vendor websites, analyst websites, social media, or peer reviews, buyers can acquire the information that they need in order to move towards a purchase decision.

However this transition in our buyers has meant that we as marketing organizations need to work with our buyers differently than we did previously. If we hope to facilitate their buying process, and guide them to consider, prefer, and select the products and services we are offering, we need to provide them with the precise information they need as part of their buying process.

The most critical factor is relevance. If we are able to deliver information that is relevant to the buyer’s role in the buying process, their stage as a buyer, their level of interest, and the areas of decision making of interest to them, we will establish a connection, and our message will get through. If not, our message will be lost in the clutter.

So where does marketing automation come in?

If you look at what is required, we need to first understand each of our prospective buyers individually, then we need to provide a message to them that has ideal timing and content based on their interests and stage in the buying process. This level of precision on targeting, timing, and content is nearly impossible without having a solid underlying platform to work from. The art of marketing, when it comes to creating persuasive, compelling copy, great offers, and elegant positioning cannot be automated, and likely won’t be in our lifetimes. However delivering the right selection of those messages to the right person at the right time is something that can no longer be done without automation.

Marketing Automation and Timing

Marketing automation gives us the ability to work on the exact timeframe of the buyer. This is best understood in the context of marketing initiatives like downloadable free trials. In downloading a free trial, the buyer has indicated that, at that exact moment in time, they are at the stage of their buying process where spending time with a trial is their most appropriate use of time. Your communications, as a marketer, need to reflect this buyer timing in order to best connect with this buyer.

Without automation, if a marketer is to attempt this with batch communications, the more closely one tries to align with the buyer’s timing, the smaller and smaller your batches must become, and the larger your workload as a marketer grows. Only through automation can a marketer effectively deliver a message on day 1, day 15, day 30, and day 90 to each individual prospective buyer.

Marketing Automation and Personalization

As one communicates with prospective buyers, each communication should ideally contain content that is precisely in line with their interests. The best way to do this is with dynamic content that automatically matches content to their interests. However, most prospective buyers will not explicitly declare their interests. If they do, the data is likely to be inaccurate. Marketing automation, by letting you tie web activity into buyer insight allows you to understand buyer interests based on what they do, not what they say.

On top of this foundation of buyer understanding, marketing automation gives you a platform from which to have that insight automatically personalize outbound content. Manual processes to personalize the content would quickly prove impossible, and the impact of not personalizing the content is a significant decrease in its relevance to the buyer.

Personalization and the Sender

However, the content itself is not the only aspect of personalization that impacts the buyer’s likelihood of engaging. Who it comes from is equally important. Recipients are 30% more likely, in most cases, to interact with content if it comes from a known person, rather than from a company. A marketing automation system can automatically have each communications come from the appropriate member of your sales team, building the relationship while increasing the response rate. To send your communications on behalf of 5 or 10 sales people might be possible if done manually, but to send on behalf of 50 or 100 requires automation.

Marketing Automation and Sales

As buyer progress through their own buying processes, they eventually reach the point when they would be willing to talk with someone in your sales team about pricing, contracts, or other elements of the purchase process. Knowing when they have reached this stage involves understanding their digital body language. Signs of buying activity can be seen and with the appropriate lead scoring algorithm, sales ready leads can be identified and passed to sales.

Whereas this analysis of leads has in the past been done manually or with spreadsheets, the need to identify and follow up with leads when they are most ready means that it must be done quickly. Using automation allows marketing teams to objectively and automatically score the leads in their marketing funnel in real time, identifying those that are sales ready and those that are not. Those that are not yet ready can be kept warm over time through lead nurturing, again a process that automation greatly facilitates.


The New Importance of Data

What we’re seeing in the above discussion is a shift away from batch communications that are not highly differentiated to true one-to-one personalization. However, as we do this, and we have marketing automation platforms, rather than people looking at the data to make decisions, the importance of data quality takes on a new priority.

Data, in order to be used by rules for personalization of content, segmentation of lists, and scoring and routing of leads, needs to be clean and consistent. Marketing teams are being tasked with ensuring this consistency is maintained at all times, even though marketing data may be touched by web forms, list uploads, CRM synchronizations, or sales input. The only way to consistently and constantly maintain a clean and standardized set of data is to use automation to manage marketing data quality in-line within the marketing database.


What Can’t be Automated?

Marketing remains as much art as it ever has been, even as the new buyer requires elements of science in automating how the targeting, timing, and content of a message is delivered. Compelling offers, captivating visuals, great positioning, and elegant copy are as difficult as ever to create. Likewise, the understanding of market segments, buyer journeys, stages of a buying process, and what moves a buyer along their buying process still differentiate excellent marketers from merely good marketers.

However, as today’s marketers shift from outbound messaging to understanding a buying process and facilitating it, they can only do so if enabled with a platform that automates the conversations, timing, and personalization needed. That is where marketing automation comes in.

Marketing Automation: Facilitating the Conversation

I was at a conference recently where a guy was talking about Marketing Automation with a cocktail party analogy. His idea was that in a cocktail party, you don’t know what stories you’re going to tell in advance, you just get a sense of people and then tell the appropriate stories. He then jumped to a conclusion that, therefore, you could not automate your marketing as that would be like pre-scripting which stories you were going to tell at the cocktail party.

Having worked with a lot of marketers in implementing marketing automation for lead nurturing, I can say that he’s partly right and partly wrong.

If you automate a one-sided conversation, you are just alienating your audience more efficiently.

A conversation only works if your stories are of interest to your listeners. When we’re in the room, we quickly get a sense of what the people we’re talking with are interested in and tell stories accordingly. With some people at the cocktail party, we’ll talk about sports, and who’s doing well in the playoffs. With some groups, we’ll talk shop, and with some groups, we’ll entertain with tales of travel disasters we’ve experienced. All groups are not the same. We read their interest through looking at their body language and adjust our stories accordingly.

One on one, this works very well. However as marketers, we are faced with two challenges when it comes to replicating this approach in marketing.

The first challenge, we’ve dealt with quite a bit on this blog. We need to read our buyer’s digital body language to see what they are interested in. We do this through observing their response to marketing and their areas of interest. From there we leverage those observations to understand what their main area of interest is likely to be, or what role they play in a buying process. It is our way of determining what stories are most of interest to them.

Once this has been accomplished, the next challenge comes down to logistics.

That challenge is how to facilitate not just one conversation, but thousands or tens of thousands of conversations. Each person is interested in a different conversation, and will likely be turned off by stories that aren’t of interest. Compounding the challenge is the fact that we need to deliver these stories when the audience is interested, not when it makes sense for our own campaign schedule.

This is where marketing automation comes in. Without marketing automation, it’s hard to imagine being able to carry on more than a few conversations at one time, let alone thousands or tens of thousands of individual conversations.

However here’s where there is some truth to the idea that marketing automation and conversations don’t mix. If you are hoping to automatically deliver the same story to each person without any awareness of their interests, you will fail. Marketing automation that forces your audience down a single track just automates a one-sided conversation. This alienates your audience as it does not alter the conversation based on their interests.

The marketers who succeed are focused on listening first, talking second. By understanding, through their audience’s digital body language, the topics of interest to their audience, successful marketers cater the conversation accordingly. Through the understanding gained by looking at digital body language to understand interest, each person can receive stories of interest to them.

A list of stories, told in sequence regardless of audience interest, will fail just as surely at a cocktail party as it will in marketing automation.

Is Good-Enough-Marketing-Automation Really Good Enough?

Today's post is a guest post from Paul Teshima, Eloqua's Senior Vice President of Customer Service. Paul is the person responsible for the team that drives the success of our clients, and is very hands on in working with clients big and small.

As such, he has been the brains behind many of our innovations on how to tackle various business processes, new approaches to scoring leads, and innovative ways to manage global deployments.

I'm thrilled to have Paul post as the insights he brings are without parallel.

Steve

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There is a lot of activity and discussion today on best practices in demand generation and marketing automation. Marketers are now realizing they don’t have to build the perfect campaign or program to generate value from marketing automation.

So on one side I am very happy that we are seeing rapid adoption of marketing automation, but on the other side, I know that we need to do more. Marketers may have become happy with “good-enough-marketing-automation”, which is a great place to start, but you need to continue to improve to get the most out of these programs.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

1. From Auto-Responders to a Warm Welcome
Many marketers have seen good results with targeted auto-responder emails (not just "thanks for downloading") once you fill out a form. this is a great tactic and can drive high response rates. But you would be surprised to know that on average 15-20% of your new leads in a quarter receive no communication in the first 60 days outside of an auto-responder.


This is largely due to the fact that your list pulls don't always account for "new leads", but rather focus on specific profile information (e.g. CIO, in New York, in Financial Services).

We have seen rapid adoption of what we like to call a "Welcome Program". This program targets new leads that for one reason or another don't receive any marketing communication due to your segmentation strategy. It can be as simple as 3 emails over 3-6 weeks that provides value-add information on why you should stay interested in your business.

Customers have seen great results with these types of programs as these leads have already raised their hand. Welcome programs can generate qualified leads at a rate of 10-15%. This is the first nurturing program every customer should have.



2. From Lead Qualification to Strategic Account Management
Many companies, small and large have targeted account or vertical strategies that involve lists of thousands of named or strategic accounts. When implementing a scoring program often this targeted list is ignored because how do you setup scoring rules for 3,000 company names, when often the field data varies by record (i.e. IBM, I.B.M. IBM Corp., etc.).

But these leads are actually some of the best leads from an Explicit or Ability to Purchase perspective. You would always call them back. So it is imperative that you include them in your scoring program (note: this may involve data tools and some complex deduplication.)

In fact we have found that 20% of all of our customers use a Named Account List in their scoring program - and many of them also route these leads directly to field sales - reducing delays in the right follow-up, and also cost of generating the quality lead.

It is important to understand that starting simple with marketing automation is definitely the way to go. But instead of thinking of it as a one step process, think of it as an effort in continual improvement. I believe that marketers who take on this challenge, will have more effective campaigns and drive significantly more value for their business.

The Goals of Lead Nurturing

One of the most common ways to use a marketing automation system is for lead nurturing. Also called “drip marketing”, “nurture marketing” or various other names, this is the art and science of keeping prospects “warm” until such time as they are ready to buy. At that level, there seems to be general agreement that it’s a great process to put in place. Similarly, the results are clearly showing that there is tremendous value in nurturing leads. However, there is often something of a lack of consensus on what the approach should be for nurturing leads.

At a high level, I would describe the goals of lead nurturing as three things, in order:

1) Maintain permission to stay in contact with the prospect: This is by far the most important goal of lead nurturing, and one that is most often overlooked. If a prospect emotionally unsubscribes, you have lost your connection with them, and you may in fact be marked as spam.


2) Establish key ideas, thoughts, or comparison points through education: A prospect you are nurturing may not enter a buying process for many months, if not quarters. However, if you can educate prospects, and by doing so, guide their thinking slightly to incorporate key requirements and ways of analyzing the market, when they do become buyers, you will be much better positioned


3) Watch for signs of progress through the buying cycle: As you nurture prospects, you can watch their digital body language to give you an understanding of when they are moving to a new stage of their buying process

Maintaining permission to stay in contact with the prospect is, as mentioned, the most critical aspect. As we’ve seen, unsubscribe rates, as measured by explicit clicks on your unsubscribe link can be very deceptive. Many recipients will emotionally unsubscribe instead. In order to manage your lead nurturing processes successfully, you need to ensure that you pay close attention to the engagement level of your audience through watching their response activity and manage the frequency with which you communicate with them in the lead nurturing process accordingly.

The need to maintain your audience’s permission to stay in contact with them is the key driver of why high quality, valuable, non-salesy content is crucial to your nurture strategy. However, that content can also guide thought processes and decision criteria. Often, buying decisions are influenced by how buyers think about the market, what “fault lines” they see as crucial in comparing vendors, and what they believe to be possible in the market. Depending on the buying process challenge you face, you can use this content marketing opportunity to educate buyers on what is possible, or on key buying criteria they may not have considered.

If you are successful in the first two goals, you can then begin to look for progress along a buying process through watching your buyers’ digital body language. You can include “teaser” content, such as content from an RSS feed and watch that for signs of interest in a topic that indicates direct buying interest, or can establish interim actions for prospects to take, such as signing up for a webinar or trial, that would indicate a deeper buying interest.

Lead nurturing can be a very powerful way to stay engaged with future potential prospects, and in doing so, successfully establish buyer preference and understand buyer timing. However, it only allows you to accomplish this if you are careful to maintain your audience’s permission to remain in contact with them.

Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

We all know that it is often best to engage with our markets by segment. However, in some industries, this can be extremely challenging as the segments can be so small that they are extremely difficult to target. Sybase faced this challenge, as one of their products was of most interest to an extremely small audience - the "data elite".

To tackle the challenge, the Sybase team catered to the data elite's natural competitiveness - Peter Kim would call it an "ego trap", but regardless of what you call it, it's great marketing.

Enjoy the case study, it's from Digital Body Language:

Sybase: Buyer Profiling for Micro Segment

For one of its key data-management products, Sybase IQ, Sybase needed to engage with a specific set of its customers: “the data elite” – people who needed fast response times in a solution to tackle extremely high volumes of data. The Sybase IQ product leveraged a new approach to data storage and querying that resulted in performance improvements of many orders of magnitude. The target buyers, however, in many cases were not aware that such a solution was possible, and may have been grudgingly purchasing ever larger hardware in order to tackle the problem.

To connect with this audience, the Sybase team leveraged the naturally competitive nature of administrators of huge volumes of data, and their desire to compare themselves against their peers. The campaign targeted a scrubbed list of existing Sybase contacts and asked them for information on the extreme challenges they were tackling - data volume, response time, or both. Based on their answers, one of three cartoon icons guided them through an information-gathering process where they were ranked as a Pro, an Expert, or Elite by comparing them to their peers.

With this basic knowledge, the campaign guided them through five stages - from collecting basic information through to fully engaged, through sharing thought leadership from industry gurus and case studies of similar professionals becoming corporate heroes through delivering massive performance increases. At each step, the content and detailed information provided was tightly matched to the individual’s biggest challenge and rank. By observing their interactions with available content, the campaign transitioned the customer from one buying stage to the next.

By cultivating that competitive spirit among database experts as to who tackles the larger data challenge, Sybase engaged with the “data elite” in ways that enabled the company to better understand who would be an ideal audience for the product. By catering to this competitive spirit, Sybase was also able to develop the opportunity to present to them possible solutions, that they had never thought possible, to a very real challenge they were having.

Lead Scoring - Providing Disposition Options

Handing scored and qualified leads to sales in order for them to follow up is an inexact science. Continual optimization of the process is necessary in order to understand what aspects of a buyer’s digital body language are key to understanding buyer’s intentions. One of the best sources of this information is the sales team themselves. However, as any marketer knows, getting information out of a sales team can be challenging. On a topic such as the quality of an individual sales lead, it may in fact seem almost impossible.

Recently, we talked about the need to implement a claw-back system for scored leads that are passed to sales and show no sales activity. This approach is useful, but is a black and white system. Either a lead is good and is worked by sales, or it is not good and is ignored and quickly clawed back. There is no opportunity for middle ground, and no opportunity for feedback from sales.

If, instead, the sales team is presented with disposition options for the lead that feed directly into appropriate lead nurture campaigns, the best of both worlds is achieved. By having an option to pass a lead back to marketing, with a specific disposition that guides what will happen next, the sales person is able to maintain ownership of the lead. However, by carefully constructing the set of disposition options, marketing can learn much more about why the leads were not accepted by sales than they ever would have by asking sales to fill out a feedback form.

For example:
- If a lead is deemed by sales to be slightly too early in their buying process, they might enter the lead into a “Late Stage Buyer Nurturing” lead nurture program that provides case studies and ROI analysis to guide a prospect towards buying

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be too junior to make a buying decision, they might enter the lead into a “Convince Your Executive Team” nurture program that provided key information to make an internal business case for your solution

- If a lead is deemed by sales to be more interested in an alternate product (Product B), they might enter the lead into a “Product B Nurturing” program

These are only a few examples, each organization will have different options. The technique of providing these “lead disposition” options to sales in order to provide sales with a “middle ground” option, while at the same time providing rich insights to your marketing team as to why a lead is being rejected is extremely valuable.

This question is one of 8 critical lead scoring questions to consider when thinking about a lead scoring system.